"Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to." -- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

As Jeremy said when he assigned me this Carnival - the 300th is a big edition. So, wanting some kind of theme - I put "three hundred" into a Bible search. Other than "mighty men" and shields in the Old Testament, I came up with this passage:

John 12:1-8 Then, six days before the Passover, Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus lived, whom he had raised from the dead. So they prepared a dinner for Jesus there. Martha was serving, and Lazarus was among those present at the table with him. Then Mary took three quarters of a pound of expensive aromatic oil from pure nard and anointed the feet of Jesus. She then wiped his feet dry with her hair. (Now the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfumed oil.) But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was going to betray him) said, “Why wasn’t this oil sold for three hundred silver coins and the money given to the poor?” (Now Judas said this not because he was concerned about the poor, but because he was a thief. As keeper of the money box, he used to steal what was put into it.) So Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She has kept it for the day of my burial. For you will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me!”

There are two men in the Bible that made huge mistakes and went through majoring grieving because of those errors. They are Peter and Judas. Let’s look at the lives of these two men and see what happened to them to cause this grief.

What does fasting really mean to me? What is the kind of fasting the Lord wants from us? I know in the past, when I’ve tried to fast for things, for answered prayers, for selfish reasons, I haven’t had much success. That kind of fast is just too hard or it is I am fasting for all the wrong reasons.

After a week of fall break, or “fall reading days”, things are once again back in full swing here at Southern. Our latest lecture in Biblical Counseling concerned the putting off of pride, and the putting on of humility. Dr. Scott, I believe, very accurately described pride as an “epidemic vice”.

Do you like to analyze scripture from the Bible? Or, do you simply want daily solace through a meditative verse? The following list of top fifty blogs for online scripture study includes blogs that range from the daily verse variety to scholarly studies that include Hebrew poetry and more.

This current recession has been very difficult for a great many in our nation . . . One of the first things that the Christian must wrap their minds around is that God is in control, is sovereign, and in a most mysterious way has ordained this.

Stargate Universe well illustrates the problem (watch it on Hulu). The show follows a group of people who have been transported to an ancient starship hurtling through the far reaches of the universe, “several billion light years from home.”

She wasn’t comfortable with this visit, but it was her duty. He had lost his son just three weeks earlier and she had conducted the funeral. The death had been sudden, tragic. The man had lost his wife only three years earlier, and his son was his life. At the funeral he had been devastated. Now he looked peaceful, almost happy. It was very strange . . .

I've never written about what the Bible has to say about your career. I have talked about the value of hard work (which the Bible regularly highlights in Proverbs), but never your job/career itself. So let's talk about it now, starting with this verse: